


it fit me like a glove

by 1001cranes



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bonnie & Clyde, Alternate Universe - Serial Killers, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Road Trips, Serial Killers, Underage Sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-02
Updated: 2014-03-29
Packaged: 2017-12-28 05:41:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/988369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1001cranes/pseuds/1001cranes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are probably plenty of universes where Stiles isn’t a murderer.</p>
<p>This just isn't one of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the danger is

**Author's Note:**

> This is not the fic I started out writing. Add Peter, instant murder. I'm hoping the posting the first half will kickstart my brain into finishing the second half. Writing about killing people is so _exhausting_.
> 
> I know nothing about Battle Mountain. Or about anything West of Indiana, tbqh. There are no Arby's near Independence Valley - yes, I looked that up, I had to _know_. Also, since Beacon Hills is a fictional nonsense-making place, the directions and travel times are made up. Fuck 'em.
> 
> title from _Whatever (I Had A Dream)_ by the Butthole Surfers
> 
> thanks to thestarbolin, Miss Marianna, and Wife for all their help <3

There are probably plenty of universes where Stiles isn’t a murderer. He’s not wired that way naturally, never liked torturing animals or setting fires, no antisocial tendencies. There must be universes where Stiles never met Peter on the side of the road, hot and sweating; where the Jeep wasn’t three miles behind Stiles’s back. Worlds where Peter never stopped to pick him up, worlds where Stiles listened to his gut and turned down the ride. Worlds where the ring on Melissa’s finger is overdue instead of too soon, a world where Scott McCall is his best friend instead of the perfect lacrosse captain with the perfect girlfriend, where his love of fuzzy adorable animals and his non-attention deficit brain and his puppy dog eyes are endearing instead of annoying. A world where his father’s smiling face brings Stiles joy instead of overwhelming inadequacy. 

It isn’t this world, though.

| |

“Where are you headed?” The guy is wearing a grey v-neck, jeans, sunglasses. A road trip cliche. Stiles can feel the air conditioning coming through the rolled down window. He can hear the rock music on the turned down stereo - what might be Chicago, or early Jethro Tull. Something you hear on a classics station. Music to ride off into the sunset by.

“Anywhere,” Stiles says, and means it.

| |

Sunglasses introduces himself as Peter Hale. He also tucks his hand just under Stiles’s knee to help him push the seat back. He sits back up and smiles. “You look a bit taller than the average passenger.”

“Uh, yeah,” Stiles agrees. “Long legs.” Long limbs, large feet, large eyes. An overwhelming and misleading sense of fragile clumsiness. The rickety stop-start of trying to adjust the seat pushes Peter into Stiles’s space. Even though Peter doesn’t linger there - he sits back up and puts on his turn signal, pulling the car smoothly back out into traffic - Stiles can still feel the shape of him for miles. A somatosensory afterimage. A buzz, like kinesthetic snow.

They talk about the weather - fucking hot - if the broken down Jeep Peter had passed was Stiles’s - it was - what grade Stiles is in, what classes he’s taking - eleventh, and nothing worth mentioning. Stiles tells Peter about invasive species, how stinkwort is choking out native plants and threatening California wineries. Peter talks about a summer spent in Europe, the food and the people and the customs, and they get into a healthy debate about the economic status of the European Union. Peter is sharp and smart and alarmingly charismatic, easy smiles framed by a faint five o’clock shadow growing around the more carefully cultivated facial hair, curling little crinkles around his eyes.

Stiles keeps his backpack on the floor between his feet and takes it with him to the bathroom when they stop for gas. There are no messages on his phone. When he comes back, there's a plastic bag resting on the divider, a Coke and a Mountain Dew balanced precariously next to a bottled water in the cupholders. Stiles takes the water while Peter watches blandly, gaze hidden back behind his sunglasses.

Peter twists the cap off of a Coke. "Leave me one of those Pop-Tarts."

"Um, they're _strawberry_?" Stiles says. "Which is obviously the best non-holiday Poptart flavor. So you can eat one now or take your chances."

Obediently, Peter holds out a palm.

"Good choice." The weird metallic film of the packaging sticks to the back of Stiles’s teeth when he twists them open. “Time and junk food wait for no man.”

| |

They’re crossing the border into Nevada when _Lady Madonna_ comes on the radio. Stiles’s mouth goes dry.

“Can we change the station?” he asks, cutting Peter off mid-sentence.

Peter arches a brow but reaches for the dial anyway. Hip-hop, adult contemporary, commercial, commercial, talk radio. He stops on Ke$ha. “How’s this?”

“Fine. Thanks.”

“Kids.” Peter shakes his head, though he doesn’t look judgmental so much as amused. “What’s wrong with the Beatles?”

“Nothing.” Nothing at all, technically speaking. They were his mom’s favorite band. The Beatles, and Queen, and Heart. Music that made her happy. Hearing _Octopus Garden_ is worse than a punch to the throat. Stiles rummages blindly for the pizza Combos. “Ke$ha’s cool, anyways. You know she did a song with Iggy Pop?”

And they’re off again, from Iggy Pop to David Bowie to Mick Ronson and beyond. Peter has a frankly inexplicable love of T.Rex, and if Stiles can’t shake off a terrible feeling of foreboding, it’s enough, for the moment, to forget everything else.

| |

When the sky starts to darken, Peter mentions he’s stopping near Battle Mountain for the night. “Heading down Interstate 80 in the morning,” he says. "Bright and early."

"Second longest interstate highway in the United States, behind the 90," Stiles reels off absently; thanks, Wikipedia. "Thanks for taking me this far." He has some cash in his bag and the credit cards in his wallet. He doesn't think his dad will cancel them for a while yet. Stiles hasn’t been gone long enough to cause real worry.

“You’re welcome to crash with me,” Peter offers. “I'm sure the room has two beds. Or we could always get a cot.” His tone is friendly. His suggestion seems sensible. He is perfectly and entirely non-threatening, and something in Stiles's gut is screaming not to trust him one bit.

He says, "Sounds good."  

| |

Stiles buys Peter dinner at the diner across from the motel as a thank you. Peter gets fried chicken and mashed potatoes, covers everything with gravy and sops it up with biscuits. Stiles gets a burger and fries, laments that they aren’t curly or spicy while Peter laughs and promises that tomorrow they can stop at the first Arby’s they see.

"I could live on curly fries," Stiles says. He almost did after his mother died, after they ran out of casseroles and meatloaf and platters of cookies. Stiles still associates Hamburger Helper with crushing depression.

The room has two beds and looks like any other. All the furniture is fake wood, the fabrics dark, the landscapes on the wall so bland they appear almost abstract. The kind of place nothing happens, or you get murdered.

“Mind if I take a shower?” Stiles asks. He can smell himself every time his shirt shifts.

“Go ahead,” Peter says. He doesn’t even look up, busy rifling through his duffle.

Stiles takes his backpack into the bathroom and locks the door behind him. He stands there for a moment, stares at the bright white bathroom with it’s harsh fluorescent lights. The bleach smell is overlaid with something slightly more flowery, like a hospital. The towels feel soft enough, at least, and not too threadbare.

Stiles turns on the shower on and lets it run. He takes off his clothes - throws his t-shirt on the floor, toes off his shoes and socks, shimmies out of his jeans - and does his best to avoid looking at himself in the mirror. He knows what he looks like. He doesn’t need to see the bruise on the side of his ribs, the scar from his appendectomy in the fifth grade, the smatter of moles across his chest, the sparse body hair. Not a kid, but not exactly an adult either. He needs to grow into his shoulders, his limbs. He’s still waiting for a real jawline to appear.  

Peter has been looking at him all day. Carefully. Not quick stolen glances but thorough measures, calculated and deliberate. Weighing Stiles. Stiles doesn’t know that he’s ever been looked at like that before. It doesn’t feel -- warm, it certainly doesn’t feel innocuous, but it doesn’t feel bad, either. Stiles knows exactly what it feels like, even if he doesn’t have a single word for it. He puts one hand across the top of his chest, thumb on one collarbone, middle finger pushed splayed over the other. It feels like that. Heavy.

The cool water of the shower is a welcome shock. Stiles scrubs off vigorously, quickly, a holdover from time spent as a target in boy’s locker rooms. He uses the little bar of soap on his hair too, likes the way it feels like fresh straw when it rinses out, sticks up a little on its own. He towels off quickly too, before he loses his nerve. He leaves his clothes in a pile on the damp floor and walks out as naked as the day he was born. Less viscera, he thinks, though technically the night is young.

“Just to be clear,” Stiles says, even as he settles onto Peter's lap, denim rough against his thighs, against the raised and pale gooseflesh rippling over his body in the cool air. Under the weight of Peter's gaze. “I don’t owe you shit.”

Peter smiles like the cat who caught the canary and has it pinned underneath its claws, his thumbs moving in circles over the tops of Stiles’s thighs. "So this is about what you want," the very picture of the narcissist Stiles is beginning to suspect he is.

Stiles snorts. "What we _both_ want," because maybe, maybe for just _once_ , Stiles should want something he can damn well get.

"Yes," Peter says, "yes, I think so," like he knows that's as much of an admission as he'll get.

| |

They lie in the bed together after, tucked snugly under the covers to protect themselves from the onslaught of the air conditioning. Sex makes Stiles feel settled. Less wired. Curling up next to Peter doesn’t feel so much like a chore, and the arm around Stiles’s waist no cage.

Peter has dropped his carefully constructed facade: the carefree attitude, the smiles. He watches Stiles like a predator, like he can read Stiles’s history in his skin, mole to mole. The topography of his face studied as intently as rings in trees, or ice samples pulled from glaciers. It should make Stiles's skin crawl. It should make him afraid, the way Peter retreats into himself. Something alien peering out of a human face.

“You can ask,” Stiles says, and some expression or another tugs at the corner of Peter’s lips.

“But will you answer?” Peter muses, punctuating each word with a tap of the fingers resting against Stiles’s collarbone, smoothing over the sharpest point. Stiles lifts one shoulder. “Well then. What’s a boy like you doing accepting rides from  strangers on the highway?"

Stiles keeps his gaze lowered, fixed on the circular path Peter’s fingers are tracing on his chest. Through the little, dark hairs growing there, next to his heart. “My dad is getting remarried,” he says. “New mom, new stepbrother. The perfect family. Leave It To Beaver for the twenty-first century.”

“And?”

"And they don’t need me.” Don’t need the ADHD, the parent-teacher conferences, the car wrecks, the inability to get through a week of school without accruing detention. Don’t need the son who can’t play lacrosse, doesn’t have a girlfriend, doesn’t have friends. Stiles isn’t sure how long it will take them to coordinate and realize he’s gone.

Peter cards one hand through Stiles's hair, gently. "That explains why you left. It doesn't explain why you got in the car."

Fair enough. And annoyingly _insightful,_ fishing for a deeper meaning that Stiles isn’t even sure is there.  Maybe he was just hot and tired. Maybe he was desperate. Maybe he's got a death wish. Maybe he just wanted to see what would happen.

“Right time?” Stiles says. “Or wrong time, maybe, I don’t know.” Sometimes the stars align for disasters too. “What about you? Why’d you bother picking me up?”

“I don’t look like a Good Samaritan?”

Stiles scoffs. “With that goatee?” Peter is close enough to kiss now, close enough for their foreheads to brush together - or for Peter to rub his facial hair against the side of Stiles’s face. Stiles lets his eyes slide closed, makes little put-upon noises, and Peter laughs.

Their second round is more vigorous. Easier, somehow. Peter goes down on Stiles until the only noises he can make are gasps, wet and startled, almost hiccuping with how good it feels, how surprising. Peter laughs at him again - gently, _nicely_ , because Stiles knows mocking laughter like the back of his hand, doesn’t he - and Peter laughs like Stiles is something that delights him. It’s easy for Stiles to curl his hand in Peter’s hair, to slip his tongue inside Peter’s mouth and over the stubble on Peter’s face, strangely and bristly. It’s easy to let Peter fuck him, slow and a little too close, like it’s the two thousandth time instead of just the second.

After, Stiles lazes in bed when Peter showers. He stretches out across the bed, pressing his heels into the mattress and lifting his hips; pulling his arms above his head until his shoulders creak. Well-used and well-satisfied, he thinks. A quote from somewhere, something he tucked away in the back of his head after hearing it once. It fits.

| |

Stiles wakes up the next morning tangled in the blankets, tufts of hair sticking up every which way, and a case of morning breath that could stun an elephant at fifty paces.

“Ugh,” he says. He wants another shower. He wants breakfast. He wants sixteen hours more sleep.

“Not a morning person,” Peter says from the other side of the room, and Stiles peeks out from under the pillow. “Shocking.” Peter’s sipping a styrofoam cup of coffee. He looks awake, he looks fresh, like he’d stepped out and gotten a shave and a haircut. Morning people are disgusting.

“It’s _summer_ ,” Stiles says. The magical time when you sleep as long as you want and no one bothers you.

"I don’t sleep much,” Peter says. His bag is sitting at the table behind him. “Can I bribe you with a slightly stale hotel danish?”

" _Ugh_ ,” Stiles says again, and ducks back under the pillow as a symbol of his protest. “Just lemme get dressed.” It feels cruel to get out of a bed that has so perfectly formed to his body, much less getting his bag out of the bathroom, peeing, and pulling on another set of wrinkled clothes. They should write songs about him, epic poems.

“Go back to sleep,” Peter says when they get to the car, and Stiles _probably_ isn’t imagining the fond tone. Then again, he’s not sure he’s entirely conscious. “You can be entertaining later.”

Stiles has no problems with this plan. “‘Kay,” he mumbles, and pulls the hoodie over his face. The front seat is too small to curl up in properly so he sprawls instead. He can sleep anywhere, and he plans to make use of that particular gift. He clutches his bookbag in his lap like a pillow and drifts off.

| |

Stiles wakes up a few hours later near someplace called Independence Valley. His mouth feels _foul_ , dry and sour; he was probably sleeping with his mouth open again. Peter whistles along to the radio.

“Afternoon, Sleeping Beauty,” he says, and Stiles flushes for a bunch of reasons that don’t need thinking about at this particular juncture, thanks. “Ready for a rest stop?”

“Sure.” Stiles yanks his hood back and regrets that decision _immediately_. Jesus. And people say California is sunny. Fuck the desert.

A few minutes later Peter gets off the highway, pulls smoothly into the parking lot of an Arby’s. “Curly fries?” he asks, eyebrow raised, and Stiles feels his heart beat trip.

“Hell yeah!” Stiles falls out of his seat almost quicker than he can unbuckle. “I’m getting a large. Two larges.” No one shall distract him from his starchy love. Also, roast beef is gross.

Stiles gets his fries and a soda; Peter a chicken sandwich and a shake. “You were one of those kids who always tried to see how many fries he could fit in his mouth, weren’t you?” Peter asks after Stiles devours his first portion.

“That implies I stopped,” Stiles says cheerfully, sibilance muffled by the potatoes -- ‘that implitheth I thtopped’.

Peter sighs. “Disgusting.”

It’s almost a reflex to say, _You love it_ , the way Stiles would to his father. “I _am_ a teenager boy,” he says instead. It feels weird to say it out loud, for a second. Of course Stiles is - of course Peter must know - but saying something out loud is different from admitting it to yourself.

Peter is still watching Stiles shovel fries down, fascinated, like Stiles is unhinging his jaw like a snake. Probably not an entirely inapt comparison.

| |

"You know how to drive stick?" Peter asks in the parking lot, and tosses Stiles the keys.

Stiles catches them by virtue of almost complete surprise, flailing hard enough to capture them in the crook of his arm. “I - yeah? My Jeep is.” He clutches the keys hard enough to feel the bite of the edges against his fingers. "Where are we going?"

Peter shrugs. Sunglasses on again, impassive as a statue. “There’s nowhere I have to be,” which is not the same thing _at all_ , but whatever. "Pick a direction."

Not West, Stiles thinks. Anywhere but back to California. “Let’s stay on 80 for a little while longer,” he says, and Peter smiles his approval. The opposite of a smize, Stiles thinks idly. In his face, and nothing in his eyes.

| |

They switch off again later that afternoon at a rest stop. Stiles has to go to the bathroom, has to stretch his legs, regretting both the diet Coke and the way his attention span has gradually waned, switching songs every thirty seconds, tapping on the dashboard, idly switching lanes of traffic.

“Get me Reese’s!” he yells at Peter’s back. A ‘yes, dear’ comes back, sarcastic and put upon, and Stiles can’t help sniggering. It’s stupid, he thinks, how comfortable he feels around Peter, how easy. Maybe it’s a sign. Maybe Stiles is just better outside of Beacon Hills.

He pees and washes his hands. He wipes them carefully dry on his hoodie - because _fuck_ hand dryers - and then pulls his phone out of his pocket. It’s a nearly indestructible brick of thing, something his dad dug out of storage after one too many smashed smartphones, like it’s Stiles’s fault Jackson pushes him into lockers. He knows it’s going to be bad before he looks. He’s tempted not to check it at all, but in the end Stiles has to know. He _always_ has to know, doesn’t he, how much of a fucking mess he’s made.

There are fourteen missed calls when he clicks it on; mostly his dad, a few each from Scott and Melissa. Two last night and then every few hours today, in increasing frequency. There’s only one text message from Scott: _you are in SO MUCH TROUBLE, bro_. Stiles can hear the way Scott would say it in his head. Not gleeful, but concerned and slightly incredulous.

Somehow that makes it worse.

_Tell my dad I’m fine_ , he texts back, _I'll see you in August_ , and dumps his phone in the trash before he can overthink it.

| |

It’s stupid, is the thing. Reckless and stupid, and his dad doesn’t have to be a cop for Stiles to know that. What Stiles knows about Peter wouldn’t fill a teacup. Stiles knows Peter’s car - make, model, license plate - and that if Peter Hale isn’t his real name its a good enough fake, because he answers to it without pause, and it matches the credit card he paid for the room with. But Stiles doesn’t know where he’s going, where he came from. Why he really stopped to pick Stiles up, because something tells Stiles it wasn’t altruism. But that it wasn’t just sex either, even the possibility of sex. Somehow he doesn’t think that Peter would have forced him - he likes that Stiles came to him, likes that Stiles made the first move. He’s a puzzle, and Stiles never could leave an unsolved puzzle alone.

| |

“This is the farthest East I’ve been,” Stiles admits later, twenty miles out, chocolate and peanut butter settling in his stomach. “Except for when I was like, four. I guess I went to a cousin’s wedding in Lincoln? I don’t think that counts.”

“My family used to live in New York,” Peter says, voice dipping. Stiles would bet a billion dollars there’s a story there, and he yearns to know it. “Haven’t seen a lot of the in-between,” with a little flick of his fingers over the steering wheel as if to indicate ‘all this’. “Looks different from an airplane.”

“Looks different from a car,” Stiles says, forehead against the door glass. Whizzing by at seventy miles an hour, Welcome To, Population Of, Come See Our Local Wonder, Home of the Foodstuff Festival. “There’s a lot to see.”

Peter makes a hmm of agreement.

| |

Stiles has an end date, maybe - August, the start of his final year, the end of the summer - but he doesn’t have a plan. Doesn’t want one. He picked up a few things from his brief stint in cross country, and one of them was that all of the ‘running to’ or ‘running from’ crap was bullshit. Running works when the only thing you think about is running. End of story. He can’t be thinking about what happens when he stops. He can't spent one fraction of one second contemplating what happens when he stops. Or, more terrifyingly, that nothing will happen at all. That the world at large spins on, with Stiles Stilinski chronically and eternally unnoticed.

| |

“We should see it,” Peter says that night. Stiles is sprawled on top of him, trying to catch his breath. “The in-between.”

“Yeah?” Stiles asks, and hates himself for the way his voice breaks, cracks at the end.

“I thought I’d keep you around for awhile,” Peter says. He’s watching Stiles’s face, stroking the back of Stiles’s neck as Stiles tries to school his face into something approaching appropriate - not too desperate, not too off-hand. Does everyone feel like this when they try to interact with other people? Or are they just better at faking it? “Unless you’ve got a better offer, of course.”

“I’ve got no plans. Not for the summer.” Stiles doesn’t lie to himself about how things will be when he gets back to Beacon Hills - running away, leaving the Jeep on the side of the road, throwing away his phone. One might have been forgivable, but piled on top of each other -- he’ll be lucky if his dad doesn’t put an ankle bracelet on him. It might be worth it though: three months of freedom before going back to being a disappointment. Three months of doing whatever he wants, seeing the world, sleeping with an older guy. Curly fries every day.

“I can wait,” Peter says, and for a moment he sounds very far away. Like when he talked about New York,  earlier. “We can have the summer.”

“I’d like that,” Stiles says, because why play cool when he isn’t? “I’d like that a lot.”


	2. i'm dangerous

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> working on finishing my Teen Wolf WIPs. hopefully the last bit will be ready for Sunday.

For a few weeks it’s the best summer Stiles has ever had.

Somewhere in Idaho Peter buys Stiles a leather jacket; lined, with an attached hood and holes in the cuffs, already broken in. It fits as perfectly as a fairy tale. In Nebraska Stiles makes Peter eat fried butter on a stick. They spend two days at a water park in Minnesota evening out their tans - “I have a _farmer’s tan,_ ” Stiles says, despairingly, skinny white legs, a pale torso, and Peter spends the second night slathering Stiles with aloe while Stiles moans, piteously. Stiles learns to give a blowjob in Utah and fucks Peter for the first time in South Dakota. In Wyoming Peter spanks for the first time, holds him down and _fucks_  him, hard enough to scare Stiles, hard enough to thrill.

Sometimes he and Peter do nothing but drive, stop for gas, and drive again. Sometimes they stay in the same place for two or three days, holed up in the hotel room or seeing the local sights, free museums and pricey tourist traps. The interior of Peter’s car goes from immaculate to littered with junk food wrappers, empty diet Coke cans, brochures for local Guinness World Record Holders. Peter has a book of crossword puzzles tucked into the passenger side door; Stiles jumps from puzzle to puzzle, clue to clue, and later Peter finishes them.

By some unspoken rule they never cross the Mississippi River. *You must never go there,” Stiles thinks, as he wings back on 34 and giggles. “Everything the light touches,” he says, when Peter raises an eyebrow. The East Coast is a forbidden land.

“Not for the summer,” Peter agrees.

Sometimes Stiles feels like he’s stuck in a film - some kind of oddball indie darling about a cross-generational gay road trip, complete with quirky, star-studded soundtrack. His usual summer M.O. has been late nights that turn into obscenely early mornings, WoW raids fueled by boxes of Capri Suns and state Doritos. It felt like a good choice at the time, a chance to recharge and forget the eight hours a day, five days a week of torture public school was. But this feels like _life_ , feels like an adventure, and as June flies behind them, quicker and quicker, he also feels more and more unsure of how it ends. Because it _isn’t_  a movie. They don’t get to ride into the sunset forever, fade to black, while Can’t Buy Me Love plays in the background. There’s nothing holding them back from New York except themselves, no rules except the ones they’re self-imposing. No deadline except the one Stiles has set.

And there are, of course, the pieces that don’t fit, the bits of information Stiles turns over and over in his head worryingly, wondering when they’ll come back to bite him in the ass. Like putting together furniture and having a handful of screws still leftover, trying to guess when the shelves would collapse, or when the chair legs fall out from under you. There’s a reason Peter was on the highway that day, a duffle bag of his belongings in the back. A reason he has nothing to do this summer. A reason Stiles wakes up in the middle of the night sometimes, alone in the hotel room.

That’s when Stiles thinks about it, mostly. By himself in the grey dawn.

| |

“I killed someone,” Peter says a day or two later. Sudden. Unbidden. He stares at Stiles and waits a beat. Two. Time enough to laugh it off, to make a joke and chide Stiles for the look on his face, for being so gullible. For Stiles to say “you’re joking, right?” or laugh like he thought Peter was.

Stiles could laugh, for the record; make some kind of joke and break the tension. Lying might not be one of his strengths, but he is the king of misdirection. _Don’t look there, not at the gaping wound, I’m sure we can find something else to entertain you._

Stiles could laugh, but he snorts instead. “I knew that from the moment I saw you.” Or close enough. “Was that supposed to be a secret?” he asks, Peter’s hand on the back of his neck, stroking slowly. Stiles always knows that sort of thing; the college guy who worked at the video arcade and watched the kids too closely, a redhead nurse at the local hospital who gave Stiles the heebie-jeebies for no discernable reason. Even Mr. Harris gives Stiles the not-quite-your-average-creep vibes. Gut instincts run strong in the Stilinski line.

“Hopefully not the nubile young things you sleep with, though," Stiles tacks on, even as he tries to calculate how quickly he can get to his bag if he knees Peter in the junk.

Peter's smile is hazy somehow. Not quite real, like Stiles is only seeing glimpses of it coming out from behind a fog, or maybe just wearing thin as it masks something else. "You're safe," he says. Stiles doesn't have much of a reason to believe him, except maybe life so far, but he believes anyway. He usually knows lies when he hears them. "The first people I killed were... murderers," the last word like a snarl, like even saying it makes Peter’s mouth taste wrong. "People who deserved it, who left the world worse than when they found it. But now they’re all dead, and I - I’m…”

"You enjoy it," Stiles says. "It feels good." Stiles isn't prone to physical violence, but there has been a time or two he crushed someone - verbally, emotionally, _psychologically_  - just because he could, just for the rush he got when their faces fell. So they would hurt as much as they had hurt him. When it suited him Stiles has wielded his dead mother's memory like a club, used his father's brief dance with alcoholism to cut like a knife. It's awful, Stiles knows, he's awful, but he still can't _stop_.

"More than anything," Peter says, eyes soft and wet, little grey pools, and Stiles picks this terrible, horrible moment to admit he _is_  in love, isn’t he? No point in denying it any longer. It’s not much different from third grade when it was Lydia Martin, from the very second she stepped into the classroom in her prim paisley dress and shiny Mary Janes.

“I get it,” Stiles says, inane and stupid and childish, with nothing better to say. “I get it, it’s okay,” his face pressed against Peter’s. He’s not sure if the tears are his or Peter’s, in the end.

| |

As it turns out, talking about murder doesn't turn Stiles on, but it doesn't turn him _off_  either.

So that’s a bonus.

| |

Every so often Peter books them into a nicer hotel. Slightly nicer, anyway, one of the places with a ‘business center’ - a few desktop computers and a printer, maybe a fax machine. People say curiosity killed the cat, but Stiles can’t help himself. He’s the kid who scratched at his chicken pox, and picked at his scabs, and wouldn’t stop popping and prodding his zits. He’s had a clandestine copy of his dad’s office keys since he was eleven, and blackmailed Danny Mahealani into putting a backdoor into the school system to check how close he was to catching up to Lydia Martin for valedictorian.

Stiles isn’t stupid. He doesn’t log into his email or his Facebook, just in case. He’s seventeen, not seven, but there’s no point in taking chances. This is research mode, not ‘see more cute pictures of Scott and Allison’ mode, or ‘check out Jackson’s douchey new ride’ mode. He doesn’t need the emotional aggravation.

 It doesn’t even take that long. There are a lot of Peter Hales in the world, as it turns out, but only so many that made it into the news. _Eleven Dead In House Fire_ , and a solid page of obituaries in the local paper. Survived by husband/uncle/brother Peter, nephew/son/cousin Derek and niece/daughter/cousin Laura, over and over, and only because Uncle Peter had been picking up his niece and nephew from a school dance. The worst case of good timing, or maybe the best case of bad.

 _Officials do not suspect foul play. Cause undermined. **Unsolved**_. Stiles rolls the word around in his mouth. Somehow he bets that isn’t entirely true. Satisfaction brought him back, he thinks smugly, and clears the browser history with a cheerful whistle. 

| | 

Once he knows enough to look, it doesn’t take very long for Stiles to realize Peter has a type. Girls with brown hair. Blonde highlights, sometimes, and dark eyes. Confident girls, tough girls. Girls who play contact sports and drink beer, girls who get in your face. Not easy marks, and certainly not victims of opportunity. Peter starts to track them the minute they appear in his field of vision. He doesn’t let them out of his line of sight. Stiles get used to picking back booths in diners, tables against walls, and letting Peter keep an eye on the door.

Stiles doesn’t know how many go missing - he’s not stupid enough to think some _don’t_  go missing, that it hasn’t happened already - but Peter isn't without restraint. Stiles catches him looking often. Not exactly the not-quite-careful slide Peter spread over Stiles in the beginning, but close. Greedier. More obvious, even, because men look at pretty girls all the time. But not all of the girls disappear. There’s one in Minnesota back working the front desk when they check out the next morning. A waitress who gets picked up by her boyfriend at the end of her shift. An incalculable amount they pass on the streets, never seen again after that secondthirdfourth glance.

How many girls has Peter killed? Stiles doesn’t know. Really.

  
| |

Somewhere in Arkansas Peter takes him to a county fair. Fried food and clanking rides, midway games, families dragging around children, groups of roving teenagers. It’s well into July now, hot and humid, and Stiles’s shirt won’t stop sticking to his back.

There’s a girl working one of the booths. She falls somewhere in that nebulous area between eighteen and thirty -- sweet-faced, but with strong cheekbones. A brunette with dark eyes. She’s yelling at the passersby, flirting with them, engaging, not just leaning against a post and waiting for someone to bother her. Stiles can feel Peter’s focus zero in on her like there was an actual heat signature to follow, and he smiles.

"Come onnn," he whines, once they’re closer. "Didn't mom give you like twenty bucks?"

Peter's eyebrow quirks. He picks up the act seamlessly. They’re in the habit of it, rolling with whatever people assume when they look at a man and a teenager traveling together. They’ve been brothers, and father and son, and boyfriends, and a hooker and his john. "I thought you wanted fried dough."

"We'll get fried dough on the way out," Stiles says impatiently. "And it's five dollars for a _bucket_!"

"Best deal on the midway," the girl chimes in. Her smile is wide, shining. Her incisors turn in a little, strangely cute in their imperfections. "At least fifty rings in each bucket!"

“Well,” Peter says. “How could I refuse?”, and his smile is genuine as he digs around in his wallet 

"Is this your... son?" she asks after a few minutes. Stiles is already halfway through the bucket - it _is_  a lot of rings - and studiously playing Bored, Petulant Teenager. Admittedly not the biggest stretch. Midway games _suck_. 

"Brother," Peter corrects with an easy smile. "Johnny was our parents' little surprise."

"Ew," Stiles says without looking up, mostly because of the name _Johnny_ , and the girl giggles.

"That's cute!”

Stiles chokes down a snort and does his best to ignore Peter’s inane flirting, the way the girl keeps tossing her head, ponytail bouncing around perkily. Maybe the most annoying part is that it’s _easy_ , god - is it always this easy? 

"This is rigged," he says after a few more tosses, every one of the rings ricocheting off of the glass bottles with a little ping. "I'm going to run to the bathroom, I’ll be right back.” Stiles has absolutely no intention of even _pissing_  at a fairground, honestly, but he figures Peter could use the moment alone.

| |

"We're meeting after her shift," Peter says once they’re back together, one hand on Stiles’s shoulder. He presses a kiss to Stiles's temple, hot and fast as lightning, quick enough that no one the crowded midway sees. “You want to go back to the hotel?”

“I was promised fried dough,” Stiles says. He’s a growing boy, come on now.  “Let’s see what other weird local food I have to try!”

It turns out to be fried mashed potatoes topped with gravy and cheese and a little tomato as a cherry. It is _delightful_ , and Stiles regrets nothing.

Peter just shakes his head. “That is disgusting.”

“You can’t eat healthy on a road trip,” Stiles parrots back at him, and Peter’s slow, satisfied smile makes him wish they were already back at the hotel. 

| |

Peter doesn’t come back until nearly dawn. “Did you wait up for me, dear?” he asks as he locks the hotel door behind him. Stiles is sitting up in the bed, flipping through the cable channels. He’s stopped pretending to be asleep when he’s not, the same way he’s stopped pretending Peter’s eyes don’t follow dark-haired girls. 

“I was bored,” Stiles admits. He doesn’t hate waking up alone, per se; he just doesn’t do well when left to his own devices. “And then I got to _thinking_ , and _imagining_ \--”

“And?” Peter asks, sitting on the edge of the bed. “What did you imagine?”

Stiles thinks it over for a moment. “She looked like a screamer.” A wretched one, really; high-pitched and then warbly, when it turned into mostly crying.

Peter’s smirk is hard-edged, and satisfied. “You wouldn’t be entirely wrong,” he says. And he smells like the forest, but his mouth tastes of blood.

| |

Maybe the girls remind Peter of his wife, or sister, or niece. Maybe all of them. The Hale family resemblance seemed strong - sharp features, what looks like dark hair and dark eyes in the pixelated black and white photos. Maybe Peter can’t stand seeing girls like that, alive and happy, when his own family isn’t. Maybe his type’s always been brunettes. Stiles doesn’t know, and for every Ted Bundy and Danny Rolling there’s a Henry Lee Lucas. 

And if he’s being really honest, Stiles isn’t super interested in what set the ball in motion. Sure, nature versus nurture is always a compelling argument, and _yes_ , maybe Peter Hale would be a perfectly normal guy without certain life stressors. Maybe Stiles would never have gotten panic attacks if his mother hadn’t died; or maybe he just would have pushed them off until college. Maybe being fucked up is always around the corner, waiting to swoop in when it sees an entrance. As far as Stiles is concerned, the past is set in stone. Trauma is forever. We are who we are, it’s already _done_. The only interesting part is what you do with it. With the shitty hand life deals.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> the first half is surprisingly murder free. I... apologize?


End file.
